Structural manipulation as part of impression management in the president’s letters to shareholders of the biggest Polish enterprises
Structural manipulation as part of impression management in the president’s letters to shareholders of the biggest Polish enterprises

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which company managers use structural manipu-lations to manage users’ impressions of information presented in the president’s letters to sharehold-ers. It is based on the managers’ knowledge of how cognitive-behavioral factors influence people’s perception and processing of information. The article focuses on selected cognitive errors connected with the effect of information order, such as the primacy effect and the recency effect, and the halo effect, which can be used by enterprises for structural manipulation in their letters to their sharehold-ers. The research method used was an analysis of source documents which constituted elements of reporting that were created and published by Polish enterprises. The quantitative and qualitative re-search was preceded by a review of the literature, mainly regarding the strategies of impression man-agement, in particular, structural manipulation. Analysis of publications that present research results on using impression management was used to formulate the research questions: (1) Do the largest Polish enterprises use structural manipulation based on cognitive error mechanisms? (2) Does the use of cognitive error mechanisms, which are typical of structural manipulation, depend on the financial condition of the enterprise in a given period? The presented research results confirm that the manage-ment boards of Polish companies do turn to techniques of impression management, especially struc-tural manipulation. Additionally, they indicate that a correlation exists between the scope and degree of employing structural manipulation in reporting and the results achieved in a reporting year. How-ever, the strength and depth of this relationship is not clear and requires further research.

• Details
• Contents